


A Life Spent Wanting

by tb_ll57



Series: In The Quiet Heart Is Hidden [7]
Category: The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alex is mostly unhappy, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Averting the future, Clairvoyance, F/M, Gap Filler, M/M, Magic, Magical Illness, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Politics, Roger is exactly as dangerous as he seems, Sibling Love, Thom is... Thom, Unrequited Lust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:24:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5168828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Roger stood in the darkness, but only because the brilliant white of magic dimmed all other source of light.  His black robe was painted with stardust spells, and all of them spelled death.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Life Spent Wanting

The Palace was unchanged.  Thom vastly resented its humdrum serenity; the everyday mass of people all churning over each other, involved in their own minor crises and no mind at all for the cosmic wheels turning above their heads.  They wouldn't know the Gods were stirred up til Their wroth fell on the capital.  It wasn't Thom's place to warn them, even if he didn't, in some small corner of his mind, want to see them suffer for their cheerful ignorance.  But it wasn't their fault, and ignorance could be enviable, too.

Duke Gareth went the extraordinary measure of touching Thom's shoulder, gloved hand rising to catch the frill of Thom's doublet.  'We should return inside,' he said.

'I want to see the sun.'  Thom stepped away, and the Duke's hand fell.  'I just-- wanted to see the sun.'

'It's a cloudy day,' Gareth replied quietly.  'Maybe tomorrow.'

He swallowed down his yearning.  It wasn't Gareth's fault, either, and his jailor was kindly, at least, where he could be.  The end was coming, though Gareth didn't know yet.  A little favour here or there was nothing to the celestial balance, except that he would have liked it, today of all days, when the gloom in his own soul was drowning him.  He would live without the sun.  He nodded his head, and Gareth gave him a solemn bow, to indicate the path.  A chill breeze rang a bell, somewhere distant, gusting like ghostly howls through the shrivelled topiaries of the dead winter garden.  It heralded snow.  It heralded many things, all of them dark.

They left the maze and climbed the hill toward the East Wing, at a slow pace accommodating Thom's tendency to wander and pick at the frost-covered trees.  The bell rang again, once, and fell silent.  Thom looked up from a dying rosebush to see two heads bobbing down the track.  He fell back against Gareth, who put a hand to the hilt of his sword.

Roger of Conte rounded the bend, stepping through an archway of leafless brown vines.  Alex, a step behind him, saw them at the same time, and faltered.  Roger didn't.

'My Lord,' Gareth warned him, wholly unnecessarily, for it wasn't Thom who wanted this to happen, but it wasn't Thom who'd tuck tail and run, either.

Roger was on them, greeting them with a hearty welcome that disdained any acknowledgment of foreordination.  Maybe, Thom thought sourly, Roger genuinely couldn't feel it, battering him from all sides like the wind.  It was possible.  It just wasn't likely.

'Master Lord Thom,' Roger said, bowing deeply.  'And my uncle.  How does this fine morning find you, Gareth?'  Gareth's stone-faced tactic of pretending his traitorous nephew by marriage didn't exist seemed to amuse Roger, his eyes twinkling merrily.  He turned to Thom.  'You've been avoiding me.'

'I wasn't aware you cared to see me,' Thom said.  Alex avoided his gaze, his head ever so slightly bowed.  Thom hated it.  It made Alex look small, and Alex had never looked small before.

'Oh, very much so,' Roger replied.  His eyes gleamed the serene blue of a mountain lake. 'Did you miss me?' he asked archly.

'Yes,' Thom said, and Roger raised a brow in good humour. 'It's rubbish, rubbing noses in my superiority when they don't appreciate it to the depth and nuance you do.'

'That's my sweet Thom.' Roger stepped to him, ignoring Thom's flinch, and cupped Thom's face in warm hands. He was nearly flushed with life, in fact, his cheeks tinted rose, his lips red and full, brushing over Thom's pale chapped mouth. 'For what you've done for me, restoring my earthly existence, I thank you,' he murmured, fingers weaving through Thom's fine hair. He kissed Thom again, tenderly. 'For what you did to make that necessary,' he whispered, 'I forgive you.'

Thom shoved him back with a hand in the centre of his chest. Roger rocked, but took the hint, and stepped away, charming smile intact.  Roger had not been dead nearly long enough for Thom to forget how much he loathed that sight.

Roger's call halted their progress just beyond the frozen lily pond.  'The King invites you to dine with us at the head table tonight.  Wear the plum.  It suits you.'

Thom could hear Gareth grinding his teeth.  For all it mattered.  Thom didn't tell him that, though.  He'd find it out himself soon enough.

 

 

**

 

 

The evening meal was agonising.  Thom found himself seated between the Princess Josiane and the Lady Delia, an arrangement that grated his nerves nearly as much as it seemed to do the Prince.  Jonathan had grown in political savvy by leaps and bounds, since becoming the Voice, since becoming the Prince of a Court that now seated a dead man at the high table and restored his rights and honours without a single word about betrayal or, for that matter, about the sorceror who'd brought him back.  Jonathan, and probably Sir Myles behind Jonathan, saw the conspiracy brewing in the Court where, only six months ago, he'd been too callow to notice that those two women bent their heads together for sinister whispers even as they played the men of the Court between them like cats with a terrified mouse.  Thom supposed Jon had not yet figured out that he was that mouse, or he would have found a way to remove Josiane entirely, banish Delia to the Eldorne estates where she could do less damage.  That he still bedded them was childish indulgence, but at least he comprehended some of the danger in it now.

Thom picked at his food, drank sparingly of his wine.  Lady Delia called the page to refill his cup whenever it ran low, her girlish titter and her hand on his knee driving like spikes into his aching head.  Roger sat beside the King, or beside the empty chair that had been the Queen's.  The King made it clear with his pointed stares that he fully expected the chair would not remain empty long.  Thom rubbed at his stinging eyes and endeavoured to avoid that daring glare.

Alex stared at him, from the lower tables.  Thom avoided that, too.

'They adore you,' Josiane said abruptly.

Delia squeezed his thigh.  Thom moved his leg.  She knew why he abhorred her touch, but the game seemed to please her, nonetheless.  'They revere you,' she echoed.  'The greatest sorceror of our time.'

'What wonders will you produce next?'  Josiane speared a fig on her knife and ate it delicately.  'Do you recall the tale of the sleeping princess?  She could only be awakened by true love's kiss.'

'I wonder you find it so romantic,' Thom replied shortly.  'It requires both parties to be capable of love.'

Josiane's face tightened.  Then it rotted, going gangrenous green and sloughing off to the yellowed bone beneath.  Thom blinked, and the vision cleared.  They'd been far more frequent, since the magic to bring Roger back.  Thom's years of study, his painstaking control had vanished, and he could no more filter the constant stream of Sightings from beyond the veil than when he'd been a child.  By now he knew the death of everyone who crossed his path.  He knew his own, intimately.  Only Roger was a blank to him.  Only Roger was beyond the reach of time and fate.  Thom had put him there, bringing him back with the stench of the Beyond all over him.

Delia directed the page to fill Thom's cup, though it was already at the brim.  'You're too thin, my Lord,' she chided him.  'It wouldn't do for you to fall ill.  Who would defend us, without your magnificent Gift?'

Thom began to laugh.  Delia weathered it with more grace than the Princess, even allowing a momentary smile to her painted lips.  Thom could almost have liked her, absurd little schemer that she was.  He liked that she would live a goodly long life, and liked even more that she'd do it in well-deserved confinement.

An abrupt hush gripped the hall.  The King was rising.  So, perforce, did his Court; Jonathan solicitously offered his arm, only to be barked at.  Roald snarled something not quite audible, but his tone was perfectly clear.  Jonathan sat.

'Baird,' Duke Gareth called, but Baird had only edged out from his chair when Roald said, this time carrying quite clearly through the quiet, 'No.  Trebond.'

Thom sought a deep breath.  His chest squeezed too tightly for it.  Delia swept a small courtsey as he passed her, her wide skirts brushing his hand.  He shook away the numbness in his fingers.  Roger watched him go, smiling mild as milk.

The King dragged them the length of the Palace, their small queue, Duke Gareth behind him and Thom lagging at the tail.  The King drove himself along like a man with demons at his heels.  They hadn't gone a full meal since All Hallows, and Roald was a shade of himself, his eyes starting like cinders from his ashen face.  They climbed to the battlements, where Roald would no doubt commence his nightly communion with the silent stars.  He took no obvious comfort from it, but all the same he would spend hours at it, Gareth and Thom chained to his side.  Thom shivered at the cold.  The promised snow had come, blanketing everything in grey.  The air was icy wet on his cheeks.

'When?' Roald asked, as he always did.

'Soon,' Thom replied, as he always had.  'The Vernal Equinox.'

'Why not the Winter Solstice?'

Because Roald would die between them, and Thom had no intention of raising the Queen from her slumber, even for her one true love.  He lied, the thousandth falsehood springing to his lips with nothing but weariness.  'Spring is life.  It will be easier.  Fitting.'

'You brought Roger back at All Hollows--'

Thom answered by rote.  'He was in Sorceror's Sleep, your Majesty.  Not a true death, like the Queen.'

'But it can be done?'

Gareth stirred, and turned away, a few steps that took him to the edge of the wall.  Thom breathed.  'It can be done,' he said, and the King nodded, though he looked more lost than ever.

 

 

**

 

 

'I had a rather well-appointed laboratory,' Roger said.  'So wasteful of you, Thom.  I had a number of rare treasures in there.'

'I don't like to work with another man's tools,' Thom retorted flatly.  'Particularly yours.'

Roger made the round along the outer edge of Thom's cluttered suite.  He touched nothing, or at least not when Thom could see.  'What happened to my old rooms?'

'Alex hasn't told you everything?'

'What an acid tongue you do have.'  Roger came to a halt opposite Thom at the solid oak table where Thom had precariously stacked his distillation apparatus.  'Alexander did, yes.  How you convinced my cousin to brick it off and seal it with curses.  I suppose you're the one who destroyed my cipher, too.'

Roger stood in the darkness, but only because the brilliant white of magic dimmed all other source of light.  His black robe was painted with stardust spells, and all of them spelled death.

Thom shook his head to clear the vision.  He'd had that one twice before.  He didn't know what it meant.  They never lasted long enough to probe for meaning, just a constant flutter of ghosts of futures lost in time.

'Do they make your head hurt?' Roger asked curiously.

'Yes,' Thom said.  He lifted a pipette from the linseed oil and dripped three precise droplets into a blown glass beaker.  'How old were you when you designed that cipher?'

'Fifteen, I believe.'

'That explains the shoddy construction.  Amateur, blunt force over finesse.'

Roger's slow grin was his answer.  'Ah, but what I lacked in experience I made up in dedication.  How did you destroy the replication process?  It was self-sustaining, even when I left the continent.'

'You used the White Anomphalous Rule.  I used Black.'

'Elegant.'  Roger dragged a fingertip along the edge of the table.  'I would have made a good King.  I wanted to be a good King.  Do you believe that?'

Thom replaced the pipette and took the pestle to the mortar bowl.  'Not especially.'

'I don't deny the power was the primary attraction.  But I did want to be remembered.  I would have been a builder, not a warrior.  A scholar, if you will.'

'A collector, you mean.'  Roger always strove to provoke him, engage him, and he was getting better at it.  Thom tried to apply himself to his work, but his work necessarily involved Roger, the only other mage in Tortall with the knowledge to do what Thom was supposedly doing, raising the dead.  They had to be seen together, at least by Roald's spies.  The trouble lay in the fact that it was not just Roald's spies, not anymore.  The Provost had already arrested two, one from Carthak, which was not unexpected, but the one from Maren was worrisome.  Maren was an ally, at least until it became too tempting and someone decided it was worth the effort to steal Thom away.  Thom did not expect it would be bribes and genteel promises.  He'd wake up some day bound and gagged in the back of a cart, and they'd have him raising armies for war.

The Palace shook and shuddered.  Men with swords flooded the Great Chapel.  The King raised high the Dominion Jewel, shouting for calm, and all for naught.

Thom dug a thumb into his eyeball.  He waited for the pain to pass.

'Is Roald a good king, do you think?'  Roger waited him out.  'You're a baron in his reign.  I suppose you might have an opinion.  Taxes fair?  His reeves good men?  His laws not too intrusive, not too oppressive?  Ah, but you wouldn't know.  You're like me.  You've spent more of your life outside this kingdom than in it.'

'Trebond is a border fief, but still a fief,' Thom snapped, offended by that-- he had his pride.  'Book of Gold, for that matter.  We held firm against the Scanrans for more generations than the Contes have produced kings.'  He mashed hard against the lump of Emerald Isles obsidian in the mortar.  'Don't look so pleased with yourself.  Alanna may have the administration of Trebond, but I hold it.  Of course I care.'

'And here I imagined you a naive scholar, ignorant of the world beyond your books.'

'I've been at Court nearly two years now.  I've had a quick education.'

'Then you know my uncle isn't as naive as he pretends, either.'  Roger shredded a stick of rosemary with a practised slip of his fingernail along the stem.  'He's a son of the Old King, after all.  He has his share of ambition.  Perhaps I came by my lust for power honestly, as well.  There was always talk of bastards.  My mother was said to be very beautiful, and the Old King didn't scruple at grosser acts than incest.'

That did engage Thom, though he tried to hide it.  'Why not claim the connection?' he wondered, managing not to look up, aware already that Roger watched him closely.  Roger was always watching closely.  'You could have had support from the barons who were unhappy with Roald.'

'Could I?'  Roger lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug.  'I never thought so, in my youth.  Roald is no fool.  He would have moved against me.  I could have bought allies, yes, but not the kind I could trust to support my aims above theirs.  The barons... I don't truly know.  I think a sorceror king would have been too much a danger to them, after a tyrant like the Old King.  Roald only made it to throne by espousing peace and renouncing his Gift.'  Roger twirled a fresh stalk of sage.  'Even having failed at it, I think my logic stands.  It had to seem accidental, seem unthreatening, seem reluctant.  Humble.'  Thom's snort interrupted him, but Roger only chuckled softly.  'Humble at first, yes.  But I would have been a good king, I think.  I didn't crave war, I didn't crave empire.  Only knowledge, and secrets, and power.  Tortall would have followed me into a golden age.'

'The Tusaine would have nibbled your border and emboldened the Scanrans, who would have emboldened the Carthakis.  You'd have a three-front war on your hands before your fifth year on the throne.'

'And Trebond to guard my back.'  Roger circled the table.  Thom refused to budge, though Roger crowded him.  He had no scent, not anymore.  If Thom closed his eyes, he could almost imagine Roger was just a shade.  A shade with warm hands ghosting over his hips.  'I could have moulded your precious sister into a warrior-mage, without all the bother of hiding silly mysteries from each other.  It would have been within my power to award you lands and titles, riches from my coffers to support your studies here.  You were wasted on those monks in the mountains. You should have been here, dazzling the university, dazzling me.'

Thom's irritable shake garnered nothing.  Roger pressed his advantage, just as he always had.  He caged Thom to the table, his arms coming to rest along Thom's, hands covering his hands.

'Macerate, not mash,' Roger said, guiding him to scrape the pestle along the smooth marble of the bowl.  'Patience will reward you.'

'What do you want from me that I haven't already given you?'

Roger moved Thom's hair, lifting it from his shoulder and brushing it back gently.  His baritone rumbled warm against Thom's ear.  'You're an intelligent man.  An attractive man.'

'You have Alex for that,' Thom said cuttingly, turning.  Roger gave him no quarter, and Thom glared stubbornly at the underside of Roger's bearded chin.

'I'm lonely,' Roger murmured then.  He followed the slope of Thom's back to his shoulder, drew a line with a fingertip along Thom's neck, creating a wave of goosepimples that Thom could hardly hide.  'In a way I could never have anticipated, when I planned the Sorceror's Sleep against the eventuality of my failure.  Alone in a way only a man as Gifted as Thom of Trebond can understand.'

Alone without his Gift.  Thom's mouth was dry.  He could understand that.  He didn't pity it, not in Roger of Conte, but he did understand it.

'If I'd known,' Roger said, and stopped.  Thom felt him exhale, his breath cold on Thom's cheek.  'If it were you, Thom, would you choose this half-life?'

'Threat or promise, Roger?'

'I mean to repay you,' Roger whispered.  'Everything owed.'

Thom was only aware of his Gift pulsating when Roger sucked at the skin of his neck.  It throbbed through him, heat like the fever that had never quite let him alone after All Hallows, and Thom closed his eyes on a wave of violet-tinged lightning.  Roger kissed him as if he could drag it out of Thom with teeth and desire alone, crushing him close.  Thom braced himself on the table behind him as Roger wrenched at the ties of his doublet, the laces of his shirt, the knots of his hosen.  Hands on his skin, cool against the pounding beat of his own blood.  Cold kisses on his chest, his heaving ribcage, his stomach.

'My sweet Thom,' Roger mused, and from his knees he looked up, not the least bit bowed, and took Thom in his mouth.

When Thom glanced up with heavy-lidded eyes, Roger's head bobbing at his hips, he saw Alex in the open laboratory door.  His naked blade gleamed in a flare of purple mage fire.  But the vision didn't fade.  Alex was there, watching.  And his eyes were on Thom, not Roger, right to the moment Thom gasped and writhed and spilled himself onto Roger's twisting tongue.

 

 

**

 

 

A hand closed over his mouth.

Thom thrashed, yelled, knocked over the goblet that had been perched beside his chair.  The magic he threw at the ash in the hearth was a little excessive, judging by the way Alex jumped.  The blast of heat singed the fine hairs of Thom's face and left black streaks on the wall.

Alex looked down at him with raised brows.  'A little edgy?'

'What do you want?'  Thom scraped at the sweat on his forehead.  He didn't remember falling asleep, but it had certainly not been dark when he'd been reading earlier.  The book was on the floor.  The pages nearest the fireplace had burnt and shrivelled edges.

Alex grabbed a doublet and cloak from the floor.  'When did you stop allowing the maids inside?'  He brushed dust from the sleeves.  'You're coming with me.'

'Did the King call for me?'

Alex pulled him to his feet.  He dressed Thom one arm at a time and draped the cloak about his shoulders.  He searched beneath the bed a moment, and returned with Thom's boots.  He crouched to lace them for Thom, and when he rose he slipped the tie from his own hair and wrapped a tail at the nape of Thom's neck.

'Come,' he said, and led Thom out by the hand.

The corridor was silent.  It was either very late or very early, if even the servants had gone to their beds.  Alex had neither torch nor candle, and when Thom raised a hand illuminated with his Gift, Alex stopped him.  He pointed silently to the man sprawled in a chair much as Thom had been, his head tipped back, mouth open.  Thom hoped he hadn't been snoring quite so loudly.

It also indicated that not everything about this was on the up-and-up.  If the King had summoned him, Duke Gareth wouldn't have sent Alex and taken a nap in the hall.  Thom hadn't been any farther than three unwatched steps in half a year.  Gareth didn't know Thom was leaving.

'Roger--' Thom began.

Alex hushed him with a finger to the lips.  In the dark they crept past Gareth on their tip-toes.  Thom started to question again when they turned the corner, but Alex tugged him along, and they made a run for the stairs.  Thom tripped and Alex caught him, swinging him by the elbow into the safety of the wall.  Thom stifled an odd urge to giggle, which turned into a nervous flutter as Alex leant against him, warm and close.

'Practised that a lot, did you,' Thom managed.

'On Jon's fifteenth birthday I got past the Duke into and out of the kitchens with seven wineskins and an entire cauldron of gooseberry fool.'  Alex propped an arm on the stone above Thom's head.  'Alan was my look-out, and piss-poor at it.  I got a week cleaning the dovecote for that.'

Thom pinched him where his doublet gapped.  Alex danced away with a squawk, then darted back in.  His mouth on Thom's was soft and sweet.  It lasted no more than a moment, til Thom pulled him close again.  Alex pressed him into the hanging tapestry, wrapping him close and kissing him again and again.  It might have gone further than even a sneaking stolen moment in the empty palace warranted, but Thom accidentally stepped off the stair and bumped his head on an iron sconce.  'Ow,' he mumbled, and Alex huffed out a laugh against Thom's hair.

'Is this about Roger?' Thom asked him.

'No questions.'  Alex took his hand.  'Just come.  Can you do that?'

No questions turned out to be quite difficult.  Thom waited, shivering and clutching his cloak about him in the shelter of a haystack, watching the grey dawn spreading slowly over the ramparts.  Alex took forever, or at least a quarter hour, to return from the stables leading a horse.  He swung up into the saddle and reached a hand out for Thom.  Against his better judgment, Thom grasped his wrist and scrambled gracelessly up the stacked bales until he could fold himself awkwardly over the horse's back end.  Alex laughed again, twisting to help him, and Thom grumbled as he hauled himself across the saddle, trying to find a place to settle without anything stabbing him in uncomfortable places.  Alex pulled Thom's arms about his waist.

'Someone's feeling confident in his reception,' Thom muttered, resting his chin on Alex's shoulder.

'Confident you'll do just about anything to get out of here.'  Alex snapped the reins along the horse's neck.  'I think we can manage a day before the King makes them send out search parties.'

The thrill of escape was hard to recapture.  Thom's grim mood reasserted itself, ever-present these days.  Corus had become a prison, yes, and it wasn't just Gareth, always watching to be sure he didn't run, the grieving King with his incessant demands, Roger waiting for him to-- something.  Thom thought he knew, even if he didn't know the how.  As Alex kicked the horse into a gallop through the Palace gate, Thom summoned his Gift again, turning up his palm to gaze at the threads of light thrumming in his veins.  His Gift should have been the violet of amethyst, luminescent and crystalline.  It hadn't looked like that since All Hallows.  Instead it dripped through his blood like syrup, a sluggish blood-red.

He laid his cheek on Alex's back, and closed his eyes against the sway and thrust of the horse's gait.

He'd never been to the woods beyond the Palace.  The Great Forest turned hilly not far beyond the city, and within an hour they left the horse tied to a tree and went on foot.  Alex had brought a bag, and when he judged they'd reached a handsome enough view, or perhaps just tired of Thom's huffing and puffing and complaining, they gave up their hike and settled on a blanket beneath a large tree stretching its bare arms up to the pinky dawn sky.  Thom sat tucked in Alex's arms, watching the sun rise and thinking, for once, of nothing terribly important but how good it was to breathe clear air and hear nothing but the chirp of birds and the whistle of wind, smell none of the stink of the City but the clean scent of snow.

'This is good,' Thom said, stirring at last.  He reached no further than the edge of the quilt, to cover their legs.

'You needed some distance.'

'It doesn't really matter.  There's no distance I can get to before June.'

'June?  What happens in June?'

'I die,' Thom said, watching a robin hop across a branch over their heads.  Alex's arms tightened about him, but when Thom tilted his head back to look, Alex was glaring at a bush hard enough to burst it into flames with will alone, never mind he had no Gift.  'What?'

Alex took a long time working up to it, honing his words down to the absolute fewest he could manage with the least emotion.  'I don't like,' he said.  'That you're-- so calm.  About it.'

'It doesn't really matter,' Thom said again.  'Anyway.  You have what you wanted.  Roger's back.'

'That doesn't mean I don't-- miss you.  Miss this.'

'It wasn't enough, though.  It was never going to be enough.'  He covered Alex's hand on his stomach, twining their fingers.  It was strange; it had always felt so difficult before Roger, and now with everything he'd feared so much to hear admitted and open between them, it was as if no obstacle lay between them at all.  'It's not your fault,' Thom said, and even stranger still he believed it.  'You are who you were made to be.  Even Roger is who he was made to be.  The greatest lie the gods tell us is that we're free to make our choices.  This isn't freedom.  Freedom would be-- would be taking that horse and riding to that horizon there and never slowing down.'

'Would you want that?'

'To see more of the world than the CIty of the Gods and Corus?'  Thom laughed.  'Desperately.  I used to think Alanna and I would do it together.  Am I a horrible person, hating her for never needing me as much as I needed her?'

Alex kissed him almost before he finished.  Thom let Alex push him down to the blanket, settle between his legs with sudden urgency.  He pressed frantic kisses to Thom's face, and Thom shoved at him only half-heartedly.  He mostly expected it when Alex buried his face in Thom's neck, breathing as if he were holding back tears.

'Don't die,' he said, muffled and strangled and desperate all at once.

Alex in the doorway, his naked sword gleaming in a flare of purple mage fire.  Alex on the ground, in a pool of blood.  Thom tried to swallow, but his throat was too tight for it.  His head throbbed.  His heart did, too.

 

 

**

 

 

The Palace was unchanged.  Thom vastly resented its humdrum serenity; the everyday mass of people all churning over each other, involved in their own minor crises and no mind at all for the cosmic wheels turning above their heads.  They wouldn't know the Gods were stirred up til Their wroth fell on the capital.  It wasn't Thom's place to warn them, even if he didn't, in some small corner of his mind, want to see them suffer for their cheerful ignorance.  But it wasn't their fault, and ignorance could be enviable, too.

Duke Gareth went the extraordinary measure of touching Thom's shoulder, gloved hand rising to catch the frill of Thom's doublet.  'We should return inside,' he said.

'I want to see the sun.'  Thom stepped away, and the Duke's hand fell.  'I just-- wanted to see the sun.'

'It's a cloudy day,' Gareth replied quietly.  'Maybe tomorrow.'

Roger rounded the bend, stepping through an archway of leafless brown vines.  Alex, a step behind him, saw them at the same time, and faltered.  Roger didn't.

'My Lord,' Gareth warned him, wholly unnecessarily, for it wasn't Thom who wanted this to happen, but it wasn't Thom who'd tuck tail and run, either.

Roger greeted them cheerfully.  'My lords,' he said, bowing first to Gareth and then to Thom.  'Thom.  You look well.'

That was a blatant lie.  Thom looked as though he'd spent the night in the dungeon being raked over coals.  He'd broken the mirror in his suite, tired of the ghosts it held.

Twin titters heralded the arrival of the ladies.  Josiane and Delia appeared, each arm in arm with a squire.  Thom thought spitefully that hanging over boys barely in full britches made the women look embarrassingly old.  He was smirking when Alex chanced to catch his eyes.  Alex looked away.

Prince Jonathan pulled up the rear, escorting one of the newer arrivals at Court.  Jonathan was most definitely too old for his companion, as well, a girl of maybe fifteen who looked likely to expire on the spot from the excitement and terror of being so close to royalty.  The Prince slowed when he saw the crowd awaiting him.  Whether it was his cousin he preferred to avoid, or his past paramours or the mage whose sole purpose at Court was to raise his mother from the dead, Jonathan did well in not turning to run immediately.  Like a man walking into fire, Jonathan straightened his spine and came forward.

'Uncle,' he said, pressing a brief kiss to Gareth's hand.  He didn't greet anyone else.  Roger's grin grew.

Delia latched herself onto Thom's arm.  He grimaced.  'Are you quite all right, Master Lord Thom?' she wondered, pressing a matronly hand to his forehead.  'You're burning up.'

Oh, go to hell, he thought, and took his arm back.  Josiane took the other one.

A servant went streaking through the gardens.  Heads turned to follow-- it was an unusual spectacle.  A moment later, the bells began to toll.

Thom freed himself again.  Only Gareth was watching him walk away, and frowned at Thom's back.  He passed Sir Gary coming toward them, huffing as he hurried down the gravel path.  Gary barely spared him a glance, heading straight for the Prince.

Prince no longer.  Before Jonathan could ask what was wrong, Gary knelt at his feet.

'I'm so sorry, your Majesty,' he said.

'Highness,' Jon corrected, and paled.

Thom sat on a frozen iron bench.  His head was swimming.  He put his head between his knees, willing the pain away.

A hand on his neck was a cool, careful touch, massaging tenderly.  Thom looked up.  'Alex--'

Roger.  He stroked Thom's cheek with his thumb.

'The King is dead,' Gareth was saying solemnly.  He knelt beside his son, and in a wave of movement the squires and the women knelt, too, and Alex was the last, going to one knee, his head bowed.  'Long live the King,' Gareth intoned.

The Earth itself was shaking.  The Palace rumbled like a thing alive, turrets tumbling, foundations cracking.  People screamed and ran.  The sky was roiling black, the clouds boiling and errupting in lightning that reduced everything it struck to rubble.  Roger stood in the centre of it, his black robes glittering with stardust, and he called down doom.  Alanna raised her sword, smiling grimly.

Thom closed his eyes.  The vision was slow to fade, but that was all right.

'Thom?'

He laughed.  He looked up at Roger's face, the curiosity in his bright blue eyes, and laughed.  He laughed so hard he couldn't stop it, gasping into his knees, tears leaking down his face, and didn't give a damn.  It was absolutely wonderful.

'Long live the King,' Thom echoed fiercely.


End file.
